26 Aug 2010

10 Sites to Play with Colors and Create Color Palettes of Your Own

I remember using hex values to get HTML color codes. The sites in this article take “color brainstorming” to a whole new level. I like the attention to detail here.

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20 Aug 2010

5 maneira de usar telemóveis na escola

Step three in the 5 Steps to Harness the Power of Cells in Education is strengthening the home school connection. Once parents/families experience ways cell phones can be used as a learning and connection tool they will become empowered and more open to using the devices as learning tools with their students.

Here are six free and easy ways to get started.

Google SMS - Translate
Teachers and families can use Google SMS Translate to send text messages to one another if they speak different languages.
How: Text 466453 with the words Translate and your message to (recipients language) i.e. Translate How are you? in French. Google SMS will reply with: Translation: 'how are you' in English means 'como estas' in Spanish. The teacher can text the translated message to the student’s parents and vice versa.
URL: http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sms.html

Drop.io - Free Voicemail Box
Set up a Drop.io account where parents can leave you voice mail anytime without interrupting your lesson.
How: Drop.io assigns a voicemail number to the creator's account. The teacher simply shares this number with her student’s parents. They can leave a message anytime. Drop.io makes it easy to name and comment on any audio recording making it easier to remember any important information about the caller such as noting if you’ve returned your call, any important documents you want to have on hand, and/or serving as a reminder to what you discussed.
URL: http://drop.io

Send group texts for notifications
Set up group texting in a service like Swaggle or WeTxt to notify parents about important events, question of the day, celebrations, exciting accomplishments, cool projects, assignment due dates, etc. If you have a multii-lingual student body you may want to group parents by language.
How: Go to the website and enter your phone number where you will receive a password texted to your phone. You can create groups as appropriate for your students parents. You will be asked what you want your name to be. Set this to the name the students/parents know you by or if that is taken consider adding your school mascot i.e. MsNielsenTigers. Next you invite parents to join either by entering their numbers in your phone or on the website.
URL: http://www.wetxt.com or http://www.swaggle.mobi

Poll Your Parents
If knowing what your parents are thinking is important to you, Polleverywhere is a great tool. It enables you to let parents have a say and show them their thoughts and opinions matter. You can poll them or request open response using Polleverywhere.
How: To use poll everywhere the teacher sets up an account at which they’ll be assigned a number for participants to send their answers. Within the message respondent enters the code corresponding to their response. This looks similar to what you see on popular shows such as American Idol. Without any additional equipment or need to download software within seconds educators will have parent responses. Another nice feature is that it doesn't matter what device your parents are using as text message, web, and smartphone responses can be instantly combined.
URL: www.polleverywhere.com

Use Wiffiti for Parent Feedback
Ask your parents questions, thoughts, opinions, and have them text answers to Wiffiti. Maybe you want to know what your parents are expert in and would like to share with your class. Perhaps you want to know your student’s birthdays. Have your parents send in the student name and birthday to a Wiffiti board.
How: Send a group text to parents asking them to share and text to Wiffiti. Everyone will know everyone well very soon.
URL: http://wiffiti.com

Twitter for Live Class Updates on Your Website, Blog or Wiki
Description: Twitter is a great tool that allows you or your students to instantly make the home-school connection by updating your class website, blog, or wiki. Simply tweet important or interesting events happening in your class and have it feed into your selected online space. Parents and families have an ongoing window into your classroom. Educators may want to Tweet information themselves or allow students to use their cell phone to Tweet items of interest when they arise.
How: Once you have a Twitter account set up you’ll visit http://twitter.com/devices and enter your phone number so you can update Twitter from your phone. You will then go to your desired online space (website, learning network, blog, wiki, etc.) and paste in the Twitter feed embed code. You can select the widget you’d like to use here.
URL: www.twitter.com

Once parents are comfortable using cell phones as an extension of the classroom you may be ready to move on to the next step. Enlisting parents to partner with students on homework involving the use of cell phones.
Read more at theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com

8 Aug 2010

Create Video Playlists and Embed Them Anywhere | Embedr

8 Aug 2010

Create Video Playlists and Embed Them Anywhere | Embedr

Amplify’d from screenr.com

Instant screencasts for Twitter.

Now you can create screencasts for your followers as easily as you tweet. Just click the record button and you’ll have your ready-to-tweet screencast in seconds.

  • Web-based recorder-nothing to download
  • Record on your Mac or PC
  • Plays everywhere on the web, even iPhones
  • Start now-it's completely FREE
Read more at screenr.com

8 Aug 2010

Screenr - Create screencasts and screen recordings the easy way

8 Aug 2010

Create Video Playlists and Embed Them Anywhere | Embedr

Create video playlists from YouTube, MySpace, Dailymotion, and Vimeo clips to embed anywhere on the web.

8 Aug 2010

Create Video Playlists and Embed Them Anywhere | Embedr

7 Aug 2010
Amplify’d from www.freetech4teachers.com

ministrators have whenever their students search for information on the Internet is having the students stumble across inappropriate materials. One way to alleviate that fear is to create your own search engine using Google Custom Search, but that could become very time-consuming. Another option is to have students use search engines intended for academic and or child use. Here are seven search engines for students of all ages.

Sweet Search is a search engine that searches only the sites that have been reviewed and approved by a team of librarians, teachers, and research experts. In all there are 35,000 websites that have been reviewed and approved by Sweet Search. In addition to the general search engine, Sweet Search offers five niche search engines. The niche search engines are for Social Studies, Biographies, SweetSites (organized by grade and subject area), School Librarians, and Sweet Search 4 Me (for elementary school students).

KidRex is a new kid-safe search engine powered by Google custom search. KidRex uses a combination of Google's safe search mode and their own database of filtered keywords, phrases, and websites. In the event that a questionable website does get past the filters, KidRex has a site removal request form.

Ref Seek is a search engine designed for academic use. Ref Seek seems to eliminate the advertising and paid links found on Google, Ask, Yahoo, and other commercial search engines. Ref Seek's intention is to serve only search results that are academic in nature. The difference between Ref Seek and a generic Google search lies lower than the top results in search returns. As you compare search results between Ref Seek and Google you will find that the second and third pages of search results on Ref Seek contain results that seem to be more "academic" than what is found on the second and third pages of a generic Google search.

Famhoo is another option for kid friendly searches. Famhoo draws on the collective results of the major search mainstream search engines like Google, AOL, and Yahoo. Famhoo simply provides a stricter family filter than the filters available on mainstream search engines.

Ask Kids is the kid friendly, kid safe version of the popular search engine Ask.com. Ask Kids is divided into five categories of which one is a general search option. The five categories are School House, movies, games, images, and video. The School House category provides students with suggested topics and links to resources for those topics. The School House also serves as a general search tool. In the other search categories Ask Kids makes suggestions for search refinement. A great aspect of the search results that Ask Kids provides is the option to refine searches based on a student's age.

Wolfram Alpha is billed as a computational search engine and this is exactly what it does. If students have any questions involving numbers, Wolfram Alpha is the place to go. Wolfram Alpha can be used for other searches, but it's not nearly as useful for general inquiries as it is for computational questions.

Google Scholar is one of Google's lesser-known tools. Google Scholar is a search engine designed to search scholarly journals, Supreme Court records, and patent records. In some cases the results will link to abstracts of books and articles that you will then have to obtain from a library or book retailer. In other cases results will link to fully viewable documents.

Read more at www.freetech4teachers.com

6 Aug 2010

iLearn Technology - 20 iTunes Feeds for the 2.0 Teacher

6 Aug 2010

iLearn Technology » 20 iTunes Feeds for the 2.0 Teacher

antonius alves's Space

Licenciado em Línguas e Literaturas Clássicas.
Professor.
Interessado em: tecnologia, arte, viagens, música eletrónica, animação, cinema...